Richard Wagner was devoted to his King Charles spaniel named Peps, who actually participated in his master’s composing.
Wagner’s biographer H.T. Finck records that Peps constantly sat near Wagner when the composer was at the piano. Sometimes Peps would leap on to the table and peer into Wagner’s face, howling piteously.
I decided to visit my daughter in Christchurch via the Haast and Arthur’s Passes. Not the easiest route on a bike, even with my friend (electric motor) to help me up the hills.
I like dancing – who doesn’t? So, one day after feeling as if I could become footloose on the dance floor again, I enrolled for a ballroom dancing class at the local grammar.A legacy of the Fifties and Sixties was that all of us could rock and roll – and even today if you listen to the original of Honky Tonk, your feel an irresistible urge to do it all over again.
Did I want to read a book about Christchurch?
I’d seen the destruction of the earthquakes, later vast expanses of nothingness and recently, steps of reconstruction. I’d watched John Campbell cover stories on television about it and each Saturday for the last five years I’d read all about it in The Press. (Maybe, thought I knew it.)
I’m going to begin this column with indelicate references, so my apologies to sensitive readers. On Saturday morning I subjected myself to a particularly undignified event.
Once upon a time in Paradise, hotels and resorts sprung up like flowers in spring. The rulers of Paradise and international hotel chains smiled, “Paradise will be the new destination for our tourists.”
And so it was. Tourists flew in and experienced the pleasures of Paradise. But along the way, the wind changed direction and nearly twenty years later decayed and abandoned resorts dot the isles of Paradise.
You’ve wanted to paint for years – but always filed it away as a nice thought, one that can wait until say… you were older? Until you realise you’re already there. And once you’ve declared your interest in the craft to an old friend over coffee, you’ve already painted yourself into a corner, because friends being friends, listen.
The first time I heard an audience stand and applaud a film, it was for Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, an indictment of a mass shooting and America’s gun laws.
The second time I heard it was last week at the first screening of his film, Which country should we invade next?
From Max Cryer‘s book ‘Is It True?’
The distress call ‘mayday’ is English for the French term m’aidez.
Using the word ‘mayday’ dates from 1923, when a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport was asked to think of an easily understood word which could indicate distress.